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> Yes, the payment processors will bark at the porn site. Move to a more expensive processor for that site only, pay 5%, 10% fee, it doesn't really matter, it's

> Yes, the payment processors will bark at the porn site. Move to a more expensive processor for that site only, pay 5%, 10% fee, it doesn't really matter, it's free money. If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general.

smt88 5y ago
I totally agree that OnlyFans is a legitimate and ethical site, but let's not kid ourselves about PornHub. It was mostly pirated content with a lot of videos of people being harmed.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  While both those things are true, the 'mostly' part is not. There are a lot of couples and singles posting their exploits and OnlyFans creators trying to drive traffic to their feed. What are you searching for that got you those results?? Let's not kid ourselves about PornHub...
- zokula 5y ago
  Nobody was being harmed on Pornhub. Don't feed the lying anti-sex work media.
  - werber 5y ago
    They were, In 2020 they removed over 600,000 videos that contained abuse. https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-161525743.html https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-1...
  - threeseed 5y ago
    There were many examples of voyeur, creepshot, revenge and ex-partner videos. None of which had the consent of all parties involved.
    - concordDance 5y ago
      Having those on porn sites is fundamentally harmless. No one stumbles across a coworkers revenge porn in practice, they get sent it by a vengeful person who acquired it by other means. Sending a pic or video is not substantially more difficult than sending a link. The revenge porn stuff is a red herring.
      - smt88 5y ago
        So in your opinion, revenge porn is harmless unless an acquaintance sees it? That's an incredibly repulsive take. It's also increasingly illegal, so your opinion of it is thankfully irrelevant. Also consider that we will eventually have face search for the internet, so someone could take a photo of you from LinkedIn and find all the places that face appears.
  - midev 5y ago
    You are grossly misinformed. So much so I have to wonder why. PornHub JUST took down 600k videos of minors and consensual acts. https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-161525743.html https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-1... Either you're commenting without being informed, or you're intentionally lying. Either way, you are harming people.
  - smt88 5y ago
    What about the company Girls Do Porn that PH refused to take down? Some of those were literal rape videos.
  - FranSanCo 5y ago
    NO good grief NO. My friend showed me the horror of PornHub. Searched for "hidden shower" or something and there were 1000s of videos of women being recorded in showers. All non-consensual. Showing these videos is classified as sexual assault in many juristictions. We reported some of the videos but they were still there 4 weeks later. Abhorrent woman-hating website. I know that evil exists in the world but it was shocking to see it so openly. But the real horror is that people still openly defend it.
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  > I totally agree that OnlyFans is a legitimate and ethical site "IRL", abusive relationships can be hidden in plain site from people who think they know the couple well. How do you stand any chance of knowing there isn't an abusive pimp behind the camera of an onlyfans account? Ultimately you only have intuition and guesswork to go off of, but both are fallible. Even if the platform itself is trusted and does a good job of verifying identities, that doesn't preclude abuse.
  - leppr 5y ago
    This is no different to buying any kind of service or good. How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker?
    - MichaelGroves 5y ago
      > How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker? That's my point, you don't and can't. You should be cognizant of the possibility of abuse, not write off the possibility. Don't pretend to know when you couldn't possibly know. People who claim that abuse doesn't exist on Onlyfans are almost certainly wrong. How much abuse content exists on OF is unknown; unknown to everybody in this conversation, and unknown even to OF. Whether OF is ethical depends on how much abusive content is on OF, which none of us know, and how much abuse somebody thinks should be tolerated, which is subjective. Anybody who claims that Onlyfans is ethical is making a claim about the rate of abuse which they can't back up.
      - leppr 5y ago
        That's a high standard for being considered "ethical". I'd argue that as long as the platform incentivizes voluntary work more than forced work, it goes in the right direction and is thus "ethical", or at least not "unethical".
        MichaelGroves 5y ago
        What the platform incentivizes is not all there is to consider. Actual outcome must also be considered. Nike can go through all the motions of incentivizing the use of ethical labor in their factories, but if it turns out that despite their efforts, a significant portion of their sneakers are made by child slave labor, then I'm not going to go around claiming Nike is an ethical business. Maybe I'll buy a pair of Nike shoes anyway, because I don't see a better option, but I still won't claim that Nike is ethical. I'll leave extolling the virtue of Nike to the Nike PR department. Anyway, intentions do count for something I think, but outcome is more important. Note that I am not claiming Onlyfans is unethical. I don't know if Onlyfans is ethical or not. I don't know what the rate of abuse content on Onlyfans is. That's information I simply don't have. Furthermore, I'm not even sure what rate of abuse content society should tolerate from a company. Probably if these are only isolated incidents that are swiftly recognized and rectified, it shouldn't damn the whole platform. Also, I think it probably matters whether that rate is trending up or down, but I don't have any information about either possible trend. I lack the information I need to support the claim that Onlyfans is ethical, and I think the rest of you do as well.
- smt88 5y ago
  I need to amend my comment here. OF's model is legitimate and ethical (let people post media of themselves, rather than being pimped out by a porn production company). Unfortunately, the company seems to be pretty morally bankrupt: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22633411/onlyfans-banned-explicit-porn-sex-content-after-bbc-investigation-leak https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22633411/onlyfans-banned-...
adamc 5y ago
But also a business opportunity for someone, with high margins.
jessaustin 5y ago
Eventually this will just drive BTC adoption. Perhaps OF had a reason not to go with this option, but other parties will step up.
- devrand 5y ago
  While that might help them accept payments, they'll likely then have troubling converting that back to USD and doing normal business banking. While crypto could fix those issues as well, it's just layers and layers of segments that need wide adoption (B2B transactions, payroll, benefits, etc.)
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Well, sure, it would have been easier not to get blackballed. We don't live in a just world.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  Sure Jess. Any day now...
- burnished 5y ago
  Gonna be hard to get people to spend a speculative asset, too many people had a couple bitcoins years ago (and everyone had the chance) kicking themselves, I think, for it to be seen as money.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, Why wouldn't it just revert back to how it was before all the amateur stuff got monetized over the past 5yr or so.
- watwut 5y ago
  The thing is, only fans is significantly safer then street prostitution. As in, some people are getting back into serious risk. Kind of like when they closed backpage. It went back - to situation I which sex seller risk more.
- lmm 5y ago
  There's a lot of people who are now in the habit of doing that and know how much money they can make. They're not all going to quietly go back to their old jobs.
zdragnar 5y ago
Free speech, separation of church and state has nothing to do with it. Not wanting to be associated with rape, child and revenge porn (variations on non-consent) is all it is. User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about (consent in particular) and as long as the user submitted content is sexual in nature, it is legal plutonium.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about That doesn't seem to be stopping e-Bay and such. I don't believe that payment processors have any idea what are people buying and selling.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    Ebay has the same kind of rules, prohibiting "sexually oriented materials" and allowing nudity "only in limited situations". (https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/adult-items-policy?id=4278 https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...)
    - jhgb 5y ago
      Except "sexually oriented materials" are not the same thing as illegal goods. I was NOT talking about "sexually oriented materials".
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      Stolen items are fenced on eBay. The payment processors don't have an issue with actual crimes like theft but want to impose a moral code on legal behavior.
      - codetrotter 5y ago
        It’s not about morals, it’s about chargebacks. That’s why.
devrand 5y ago
My understanding is that this industry has way higher than average chargeback/fraud rates, which is really what discourages payment processors/banks from wanting to support them.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Selling porn site accounts is a popular way to turn stolen credit card details into untraceable cryptocurrencies. That means there is already an userbase for crypto porn.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    The first commercial use of any technology is porn ;)
    - jenkstom 5y ago
      Or Pizza.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Though whether that's a convenient excuse for prudishness or not, we'll never know (because you can't collect data on chargebacks if you don't allow any sex sites to make charges in the first place). Banks are notoriously risk-averse. This is a disruption waiting to happen for the first person who can crack handling sex-worker credit card payments despite the banks.
  - devrand 5y ago
    True, but I think there's obvious legs to it. Some common reasons for fraud are: * Laundering money (buy accounts with stolen cards, sell them using crypto to people who don't want to be associated with the accounts). * People falsely claiming fraud to cover up the payments (ex. a spouse finding out about them). * More specific to OF, people paying for private/custom content and then filing a chargeback. I think people being prudish is kind of what allows this market to be ripe with fraud. I'm not sure there's a way to "disrupt" this industry using credit cards just due to the inherent tendency for fraud in the market.
yholio 5y ago
Porn sites still exist and they accept credit card payments all the time. The major credit networks do not censor them. Then, it's simply a question of the fee structure.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  Yes and no. Credit card companies are fine with the professionally produced stuff, because everyone signs model releases and shows ID. It seems like they are fine with softcore amateur stuff like showing vulva and nipples. What they don't like is hard-core amateur stuff. Its hard to verify the models there. You see titles like "I brought my tinder date home and rode him/her hard" in a video title and you start to wonder if this person consented to being in a paid film, or if they are of legal age. My guess is onlyfans will ban anything involving two or more people. It will become instagram with tits and parasocial relationships.
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    > It will become instagram with tits and parasocial relationships. Instagram is already Instagram with tits and parasocial relationships.
recursivedoubts 5y ago
the free speech issue has been settled: it is no longer a core value in western societies it's all who/whom now i don't like it, but that's the reality
actually_a_dog 5y ago
> If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general. Welcome to the "free(ish) market." As I've said before, people love to say they're in favor of the "free market," until they get one. There is no law preventing any payment processor from accepting clients in the adult content space. They do it simply because of risk and to protect their corporate image.
- nickff 5y ago
  Well, there may not be laws against it, but the government doesn't always play by the rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
  - posguy 5y ago
    The chokepoint isn't the government in this case, but rather the major card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express). In the US, these brands have embedded morality clauses that prohibit these payments from riding their rails[1]. That being said, most US debit networks (Star, Pulse, Coop, etc) don't have these restrictions. It does damage the user experience to limit your card acceptance to most debit cards. 1 - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-updates-policy-for-adult-content-sellers https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda...
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      It's that weird American kind of funny that you can't pay for porn with an American Express credit card, but you can buy guns and a few crates of ammo.
      - stjohnswarts 5y ago
DantesKite 5y ago
Do you think prostitution should be legal?
- watwut 5y ago
  Yes.
- LandR 5y ago
  I think this is a tough one, and I'm not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand I don't think the government should be able to tell you what you can and can't do with your body. If you want to sell your body, you should be able to. But on the other hand, if you legalise it then you open the door to people being exploited, and I'm aware that people are exploited now in prostitution, obviously, but I feel if it's legal it might be harder to punish those that do. So maybe on balance it's better for it to be illegal if it protects at least some people.
  - TotempaaltJ 5y ago
    > I feel if it's legal it might be harder to punish those that do. Or it could be easier because it becomes regulated and controlled?
  - nixass 5y ago
    How do you think keeping it illegal keeps sex workers more safe?
- mynegation 5y ago
  Sex work should be legal. I do not want to use the word “prostitution” as it carries unnecessary stigma. The main consideration is the safety of sex workers. Exploitation does exist but victims are hesitant to go law enforcement precisely because sex work is illegal. On the flip side people organizing sex work enterprises (aka “pimps” and “madams”) are already breaking the law so for them application of violence is not out of the framework.
  - 8note 5y ago
biztos 5y ago
It really seems weird to me that with all the countries that allow various forms of sex work, payment processing is still such a bottleneck. As I understand it, independent providers doing 100% legal work in their countries live in terror of their payments being cut off due to the factors mentioned above. Where is the CoinBase of legal erotica?
- dboreham 5y ago
  That was "SpankChain", I believe.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    Which is a scam along with any other porn themed coin. Every sex worker I’ve ever met holds bitcoin (maybe ether if they newer in this space). Sex workers know what is money and what is a fraud.
- svachalek 5y ago
  I wonder if crypto has finally found its "killer app". Pseudo privacy, no charge backs, permissionless.
  - doliveira 5y ago
    That's what it was back in the Silk Road times, wasn't it? Hopefully it will go back to that
  - compiler-guy 5y ago
    For consumers, “no chargebacks” is an anti feature. Chargebacks are common by porn consumers for both invalid reasons—-like denying that you did bought porn to a spouse—and valid reasons—like a shady site over charging you. Both things are quite common in this space.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      With crypto you can not be overcharged because you approve the transaction before any money is sent vs giving the site the details to pull money from your account. I still agree that no chargebacks is an issue though.
mtnGoat 5y ago
PH is having problems due to so much "user uploaded" content that they can not verify the identity of the actors contained within. The difference now is that Mastercard is enforcing the rules rather than the US Government which had USC2257 in place for many years with the same requirements. The difference this time is that MC is global(and controls these sites income) and USGov is not, so MC is actually able to enforce this. Adult content sites with their IDs in order(as all US based ones should have already) will have no problem under the new rules. It's not a closing down of the business its actual enforcement of rules that have been on the books for 20+ years by a private entity instead of the lax USGov. Lets be real, if PH had a way to take monies without having to clean up to save face for the card issuers, it would still be business as usual.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  I wonder if the reason "sexually explicit content" isn't allowed is because that generally involves a partner. I believe OF requires ID verification before you can do _anything_ as a creator, so they're trying to curb that by making it essentially a solo website. It might be a better idea to require all participants in videos to have their OF account linked and tagged in the video.
- techdragon 5y ago
  It’s my understanding that PornHub have purged out non-verified content to fully comply with things such as USC2257 and gone further than the letter of the law in a desire to clean up their image and yet MasterCard, Visa and Discover still refuse them. This is not as simple as “follow the law”. OnlyFans already appears to require sufficient identification that at least for account owners they pass the USC2257 bar, so content featuring just the account holder should completely pass legal scrutiny in the USA. Yet they still have this pressure from MasterCard and the discussion isn’t about type of adult content (performers other than the account holder) it’s about all adult content. This is someone who saw the successful pressure tactics work on PornHub and wants to go further. It’s also important to remember that MasterCard and Visa don’t directly offer services to anyone but banks/payment processors, so while there are “high risk” payment processors such as CCBill, etc, MasterCard as network operators are saying “for these specific people… no”.
TameAntelope 5y ago
I find it utterly fascinating that Reddit is able to maintain such a huge porn collection with relatively little attention. I wish I knew what percentage of submissions were in NSFW subreddits, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the majority. Maybe it's because they're not trying to make money off of it? I don't think they run ads on NSFW subreddits. I wonder if there's a market for something like how strip clubs operate -- where the artist pays OnlyFans to stream there, and then the artist collects their income some other way (e.g. Patreon, or just direct cash equivalents). That could in theory keep OnlyFans good with their payment processors, while still keeping this revenue stream at least somewhat open.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  Given how janky the last few years of website updates on reddit have been, the sheer user hostility might be reason enough alongside 0 monetization that keeps it afloat.
- lijogdfljk 5y ago
  > I find it utterly fascinating that Reddit is able to maintain such a huge porn collection with relatively little attention. I suspect they're working in the same direction, no? For example a few months back they removed NSFW from /r/all. They didn't just make it user-config'd SFW by default, to my knowledge you cannot browse NSFW content on /r/all. So they sort of ghosted that entire genre on their site. Maybe they'll stop there?
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    There was all kinds of nsfw (including porn) stuff on r/all this morning for me.
    - vultour 5y ago
      There are NSFW posts but it's never porn, mostly random things you might not want to open at work even though they're harmless.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
commandlinefan 5y ago
> It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints Maybe by accelerating adoption and normalization of cryptocurrency.
nemo44x 5y ago
Looks like we found the killer app for Bitcoin.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Bitcoin for nefarious purposes. Who would have thought?
salt-thrower 5y ago
It's my understanding that PH is the only adult site with this issue. They got in hot water because of a series of high-profile lawsuits and media pieces about exploitation videos on their platform. OF would likely not run into this because all of its content creators are verified and can only post videos of themselves or videos they have the rights to; it's not a free-for-all upload fest like PH used to be.
Sebb767 5y ago
> If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. According to the article, they value themselves over 1 billion. That's not a small company in my books.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Sounds like some (large & credible) international company with less puritanical execs than those in the USA need to start a new credit card company or payment service
TeeMassive 5y ago
PH got in trouble due to a NYT hit piece and is usual this is usually more of a corporate maneuver than an actual article done in the name of the public interest. See Pewdiepie who got one just about when he got a deal with Disney; surely pure coincidence. The fact is, MindGeek, who operates PH and the others, is the reason all the corporate porn studios stopped making profits. When was the last time you saw a full length > 90 minutes porn movie produced after ~2010? This used to be a huge industry just as big than Hollywood. A few days later low and behold the first thing MindGeek does is to stop people from downloading videos and only accept payments for studio made videos. "Think of the children" is a meme at this point and should raise eyebrows whenever it is raised up as an argument.
joshxyz 5y ago
that actually opens up a market for a new payment processor that is capable of dealing with these kind of payments. i honestly wonder if onlyfans explored and exhausted that route thoroughly

smt88 5y ago

I totally agree that OnlyFans is a legitimate and ethical site, but let's not kid ourselves about PornHub. It was mostly pirated content with a lot of videos of people being harmed.

tomc1985 5y ago
While both those things are true, the 'mostly' part is not. There are a lot of couples and singles posting their exploits and OnlyFans creators trying to drive traffic to their feed. What are you searching for that got you those results?? Let's not kid ourselves about PornHub...
zokula 5y ago
Nobody was being harmed on Pornhub. Don't feed the lying anti-sex work media.
- werber 5y ago
  They were, In 2020 they removed over 600,000 videos that contained abuse. https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-161525743.html https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-1...
- threeseed 5y ago
  There were many examples of voyeur, creepshot, revenge and ex-partner videos. None of which had the consent of all parties involved.
  - concordDance 5y ago
    Having those on porn sites is fundamentally harmless. No one stumbles across a coworkers revenge porn in practice, they get sent it by a vengeful person who acquired it by other means. Sending a pic or video is not substantially more difficult than sending a link. The revenge porn stuff is a red herring.
    - smt88 5y ago
      So in your opinion, revenge porn is harmless unless an acquaintance sees it? That's an incredibly repulsive take. It's also increasingly illegal, so your opinion of it is thankfully irrelevant. Also consider that we will eventually have face search for the internet, so someone could take a photo of you from LinkedIn and find all the places that face appears.
- midev 5y ago
  You are grossly misinformed. So much so I have to wonder why. PornHub JUST took down 600k videos of minors and consensual acts. https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-161525743.html https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-1... Either you're commenting without being informed, or you're intentionally lying. Either way, you are harming people.
- smt88 5y ago
  What about the company Girls Do Porn that PH refused to take down? Some of those were literal rape videos.
- FranSanCo 5y ago
  NO good grief NO. My friend showed me the horror of PornHub. Searched for "hidden shower" or something and there were 1000s of videos of women being recorded in showers. All non-consensual. Showing these videos is classified as sexual assault in many juristictions. We reported some of the videos but they were still there 4 weeks later. Abhorrent woman-hating website. I know that evil exists in the world but it was shocking to see it so openly. But the real horror is that people still openly defend it.
MichaelGroves 5y ago
> I totally agree that OnlyFans is a legitimate and ethical site "IRL", abusive relationships can be hidden in plain site from people who think they know the couple well. How do you stand any chance of knowing there isn't an abusive pimp behind the camera of an onlyfans account? Ultimately you only have intuition and guesswork to go off of, but both are fallible. Even if the platform itself is trusted and does a good job of verifying identities, that doesn't preclude abuse.
- leppr 5y ago
  This is no different to buying any kind of service or good. How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker?
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
    > How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker? That's my point, you don't and can't. You should be cognizant of the possibility of abuse, not write off the possibility. Don't pretend to know when you couldn't possibly know. People who claim that abuse doesn't exist on Onlyfans are almost certainly wrong. How much abuse content exists on OF is unknown; unknown to everybody in this conversation, and unknown even to OF. Whether OF is ethical depends on how much abusive content is on OF, which none of us know, and how much abuse somebody thinks should be tolerated, which is subjective. Anybody who claims that Onlyfans is ethical is making a claim about the rate of abuse which they can't back up.
    - leppr 5y ago
      That's a high standard for being considered "ethical". I'd argue that as long as the platform incentivizes voluntary work more than forced work, it goes in the right direction and is thus "ethical", or at least not "unethical".
      - MichaelGroves 5y ago
        What the platform incentivizes is not all there is to consider. Actual outcome must also be considered. Nike can go through all the motions of incentivizing the use of ethical labor in their factories, but if it turns out that despite their efforts, a significant portion of their sneakers are made by child slave labor, then I'm not going to go around claiming Nike is an ethical business. Maybe I'll buy a pair of Nike shoes anyway, because I don't see a better option, but I still won't claim that Nike is ethical. I'll leave extolling the virtue of Nike to the Nike PR department. Anyway, intentions do count for something I think, but outcome is more important. Note that I am not claiming Onlyfans is unethical. I don't know if Onlyfans is ethical or not. I don't know what the rate of abuse content on Onlyfans is. That's information I simply don't have. Furthermore, I'm not even sure what rate of abuse content society should tolerate from a company. Probably if these are only isolated incidents that are swiftly recognized and rectified, it shouldn't damn the whole platform. Also, I think it probably matters whether that rate is trending up or down, but I don't have any information about either possible trend. I lack the information I need to support the claim that Onlyfans is ethical, and I think the rest of you do as well.
smt88 5y ago
I need to amend my comment here. OF's model is legitimate and ethical (let people post media of themselves, rather than being pimped out by a porn production company). Unfortunately, the company seems to be pretty morally bankrupt: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22633411/onlyfans-banned-explicit-porn-sex-content-after-bbc-investigation-leak https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22633411/onlyfans-banned-...

adamc 5y ago

But also a business opportunity for someone, with high margins.

jessaustin 5y ago

Eventually this will just drive BTC adoption. Perhaps OF had a reason not to go with this option, but other parties will step up.

devrand 5y ago
While that might help them accept payments, they'll likely then have troubling converting that back to USD and doing normal business banking. While crypto could fix those issues as well, it's just layers and layers of segments that need wide adoption (B2B transactions, payroll, benefits, etc.)
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Well, sure, it would have been easier not to get blackballed. We don't live in a just world.
chitowneats 5y ago
Sure Jess. Any day now...
burnished 5y ago
Gonna be hard to get people to spend a speculative asset, too many people had a couple bitcoins years ago (and everyone had the chance) kicking themselves, I think, for it to be seen as money.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, Why wouldn't it just revert back to how it was before all the amateur stuff got monetized over the past 5yr or so.

watwut 5y ago
The thing is, only fans is significantly safer then street prostitution. As in, some people are getting back into serious risk. Kind of like when they closed backpage. It went back - to situation I which sex seller risk more.
lmm 5y ago
There's a lot of people who are now in the habit of doing that and know how much money they can make. They're not all going to quietly go back to their old jobs.

zdragnar 5y ago

Free speech, separation of church and state has nothing to do with it. Not wanting to be associated with rape, child and revenge porn (variations on non-consent) is all it is. User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about (consent in particular) and as long as the user submitted content is sexual in nature, it is legal plutonium.

jhgb 5y ago
> User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about That doesn't seem to be stopping e-Bay and such. I don't believe that payment processors have any idea what are people buying and selling.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  Ebay has the same kind of rules, prohibiting "sexually oriented materials" and allowing nudity "only in limited situations". (https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/adult-items-policy?id=4278 https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...)
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Except "sexually oriented materials" are not the same thing as illegal goods. I was NOT talking about "sexually oriented materials".
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Stolen items are fenced on eBay. The payment processors don't have an issue with actual crimes like theft but want to impose a moral code on legal behavior.
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      It’s not about morals, it’s about chargebacks. That’s why.

devrand 5y ago

My understanding is that this industry has way higher than average chargeback/fraud rates, which is really what discourages payment processors/banks from wanting to support them.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
Selling porn site accounts is a popular way to turn stolen credit card details into untraceable cryptocurrencies. That means there is already an userbase for crypto porn.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  The first commercial use of any technology is porn ;)
  - jenkstom 5y ago
    Or Pizza.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Though whether that's a convenient excuse for prudishness or not, we'll never know (because you can't collect data on chargebacks if you don't allow any sex sites to make charges in the first place). Banks are notoriously risk-averse. This is a disruption waiting to happen for the first person who can crack handling sex-worker credit card payments despite the banks.
- devrand 5y ago
  True, but I think there's obvious legs to it. Some common reasons for fraud are: * Laundering money (buy accounts with stolen cards, sell them using crypto to people who don't want to be associated with the accounts). * People falsely claiming fraud to cover up the payments (ex. a spouse finding out about them). * More specific to OF, people paying for private/custom content and then filing a chargeback. I think people being prudish is kind of what allows this market to be ripe with fraud. I'm not sure there's a way to "disrupt" this industry using credit cards just due to the inherent tendency for fraud in the market.

yholio 5y ago

Porn sites still exist and they accept credit card payments all the time. The major credit networks do not censor them. Then, it's simply a question of the fee structure.

Seattle3503 5y ago
Yes and no. Credit card companies are fine with the professionally produced stuff, because everyone signs model releases and shows ID. It seems like they are fine with softcore amateur stuff like showing vulva and nipples. What they don't like is hard-core amateur stuff. Its hard to verify the models there. You see titles like "I brought my tinder date home and rode him/her hard" in a video title and you start to wonder if this person consented to being in a paid film, or if they are of legal age. My guess is onlyfans will ban anything involving two or more people. It will become instagram with tits and parasocial relationships.
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  > It will become instagram with tits and parasocial relationships. Instagram is already Instagram with tits and parasocial relationships.

recursivedoubts 5y ago

the free speech issue has been settled: it is no longer a core value in western societies it's all who/whom now i don't like it, but that's the reality

actually_a_dog 5y ago

> If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general. Welcome to the "free(ish) market." As I've said before, people love to say they're in favor of the "free market," until they get one. There is no law preventing any payment processor from accepting clients in the adult content space. They do it simply because of risk and to protect their corporate image.

nickff 5y ago
Well, there may not be laws against it, but the government doesn't always play by the rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
- posguy 5y ago
  The chokepoint isn't the government in this case, but rather the major card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express). In the US, these brands have embedded morality clauses that prohibit these payments from riding their rails[1]. That being said, most US debit networks (Star, Pulse, Coop, etc) don't have these restrictions. It does damage the user experience to limit your card acceptance to most debit cards. 1 - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-updates-policy-for-adult-content-sellers https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda...
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    It's that weird American kind of funny that you can't pay for porn with an American Express credit card, but you can buy guns and a few crates of ammo.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago

DantesKite 5y ago

Do you think prostitution should be legal?

watwut 5y ago
Yes.
LandR 5y ago
I think this is a tough one, and I'm not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand I don't think the government should be able to tell you what you can and can't do with your body. If you want to sell your body, you should be able to. But on the other hand, if you legalise it then you open the door to people being exploited, and I'm aware that people are exploited now in prostitution, obviously, but I feel if it's legal it might be harder to punish those that do. So maybe on balance it's better for it to be illegal if it protects at least some people.
- TotempaaltJ 5y ago
  > I feel if it's legal it might be harder to punish those that do. Or it could be easier because it becomes regulated and controlled?
- nixass 5y ago
  How do you think keeping it illegal keeps sex workers more safe?
mynegation 5y ago
Sex work should be legal. I do not want to use the word “prostitution” as it carries unnecessary stigma. The main consideration is the safety of sex workers. Exploitation does exist but victims are hesitant to go law enforcement precisely because sex work is illegal. On the flip side people organizing sex work enterprises (aka “pimps” and “madams”) are already breaking the law so for them application of violence is not out of the framework.
- 8note 5y ago

biztos 5y ago

It really seems weird to me that with all the countries that allow various forms of sex work, payment processing is still such a bottleneck. As I understand it, independent providers doing 100% legal work in their countries live in terror of their payments being cut off due to the factors mentioned above. Where is the CoinBase of legal erotica?

dboreham 5y ago
That was "SpankChain", I believe.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Which is a scam along with any other porn themed coin. Every sex worker I’ve ever met holds bitcoin (maybe ether if they newer in this space). Sex workers know what is money and what is a fraud.
svachalek 5y ago
I wonder if crypto has finally found its "killer app". Pseudo privacy, no charge backs, permissionless.
- doliveira 5y ago
  That's what it was back in the Silk Road times, wasn't it? Hopefully it will go back to that
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  For consumers, “no chargebacks” is an anti feature. Chargebacks are common by porn consumers for both invalid reasons—-like denying that you did bought porn to a spouse—and valid reasons—like a shady site over charging you. Both things are quite common in this space.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    With crypto you can not be overcharged because you approve the transaction before any money is sent vs giving the site the details to pull money from your account. I still agree that no chargebacks is an issue though.

mtnGoat 5y ago

PH is having problems due to so much "user uploaded" content that they can not verify the identity of the actors contained within. The difference now is that Mastercard is enforcing the rules rather than the US Government which had USC2257 in place for many years with the same requirements. The difference this time is that MC is global(and controls these sites income) and USGov is not, so MC is actually able to enforce this. Adult content sites with their IDs in order(as all US based ones should have already) will have no problem under the new rules. It's not a closing down of the business its actual enforcement of rules that have been on the books for 20+ years by a private entity instead of the lax USGov. Lets be real, if PH had a way to take monies without having to clean up to save face for the card issuers, it would still be business as usual.

jackson1442 5y ago
I wonder if the reason "sexually explicit content" isn't allowed is because that generally involves a partner. I believe OF requires ID verification before you can do _anything_ as a creator, so they're trying to curb that by making it essentially a solo website. It might be a better idea to require all participants in videos to have their OF account linked and tagged in the video.
techdragon 5y ago
It’s my understanding that PornHub have purged out non-verified content to fully comply with things such as USC2257 and gone further than the letter of the law in a desire to clean up their image and yet MasterCard, Visa and Discover still refuse them. This is not as simple as “follow the law”. OnlyFans already appears to require sufficient identification that at least for account owners they pass the USC2257 bar, so content featuring just the account holder should completely pass legal scrutiny in the USA. Yet they still have this pressure from MasterCard and the discussion isn’t about type of adult content (performers other than the account holder) it’s about all adult content. This is someone who saw the successful pressure tactics work on PornHub and wants to go further. It’s also important to remember that MasterCard and Visa don’t directly offer services to anyone but banks/payment processors, so while there are “high risk” payment processors such as CCBill, etc, MasterCard as network operators are saying “for these specific people… no”.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I find it utterly fascinating that Reddit is able to maintain such a huge porn collection with relatively little attention. I wish I knew what percentage of submissions were in NSFW subreddits, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the majority. Maybe it's because they're not trying to make money off of it? I don't think they run ads on NSFW subreddits. I wonder if there's a market for something like how strip clubs operate -- where the artist pays OnlyFans to stream there, and then the artist collects their income some other way (e.g. Patreon, or just direct cash equivalents). That could in theory keep OnlyFans good with their payment processors, while still keeping this revenue stream at least somewhat open.

tehbeard 5y ago
Given how janky the last few years of website updates on reddit have been, the sheer user hostility might be reason enough alongside 0 monetization that keeps it afloat.
lijogdfljk 5y ago
> I find it utterly fascinating that Reddit is able to maintain such a huge porn collection with relatively little attention. I suspect they're working in the same direction, no? For example a few months back they removed NSFW from /r/all. They didn't just make it user-config'd SFW by default, to my knowledge you cannot browse NSFW content on /r/all. So they sort of ghosted that entire genre on their site. Maybe they'll stop there?
- Y_Y 5y ago
  There was all kinds of nsfw (including porn) stuff on r/all this morning for me.
  - vultour 5y ago
    There are NSFW posts but it's never porn, mostly random things you might not want to open at work even though they're harmless.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago

commandlinefan 5y ago

> It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints Maybe by accelerating adoption and normalization of cryptocurrency.

nemo44x 5y ago

Looks like we found the killer app for Bitcoin.

quickthrower2 5y ago
Bitcoin for nefarious purposes. Who would have thought?

salt-thrower 5y ago

It's my understanding that PH is the only adult site with this issue. They got in hot water because of a series of high-profile lawsuits and media pieces about exploitation videos on their platform. OF would likely not run into this because all of its content creators are verified and can only post videos of themselves or videos they have the rights to; it's not a free-for-all upload fest like PH used to be.

Sebb767 5y ago

> If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. According to the article, they value themselves over 1 billion. That's not a small company in my books.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Sounds like some (large & credible) international company with less puritanical execs than those in the USA need to start a new credit card company or payment service

TeeMassive 5y ago

PH got in trouble due to a NYT hit piece and is usual this is usually more of a corporate maneuver than an actual article done in the name of the public interest. See Pewdiepie who got one just about when he got a deal with Disney; surely pure coincidence. The fact is, MindGeek, who operates PH and the others, is the reason all the corporate porn studios stopped making profits. When was the last time you saw a full length > 90 minutes porn movie produced after ~2010? This used to be a huge industry just as big than Hollywood. A few days later low and behold the first thing MindGeek does is to stop people from downloading videos and only accept payments for studio made videos. "Think of the children" is a meme at this point and should raise eyebrows whenever it is raised up as an argument.

joshxyz 5y ago

that actually opens up a market for a new payment processor that is capable of dealing with these kind of payments. i honestly wonder if onlyfans explored and exhausted that route thoroughly